


Lay Down Your Burdens

by escritoireazul



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-10
Updated: 2008-11-10
Packaged: 2017-11-14 11:58:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/515006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/escritoireazul/pseuds/escritoireazul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It has a taste, a scent, a feel. It simply isn't for her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lay Down Your Burdens

**Author's Note:**

> Setting: During comics season 8, after "The Chain" (issue #5)

“Buffy.”

The woman looks at her like it should be a question, but it’s not. Her voice is flat.

She makes a move that’s a nod, a shrug, a flinch – a little bit of all of them, and everything else in between – but says nothing.

“Oh, Buffy. I never wanted to see you here.” She laughs a little – Kendra laughs a little, she suddenly knows her name is Kendra, and she had been a Slayer once – and tilts her head. “Stupid, no Slayer lives forever, but – I guess….” She trails off, and then frowns and looks at her harder. “You’re not right. Do you not belong here?”

“Don’t know,” she says, “where’s here, exactly?”

Kendra takes a breath, seems to think about what she’s going to say before she speaks. “This is where we all go, after. The next is called, and we are sent away. We are sent here.”

She must see the incomprehension.

“Heaven.”

The word has a taste, a scent, a feel. It’s hot chocolate with heavy cream and the bite of fresh oranges sharp in her nose and the slick feel of lotioned bodies pressed against each other.

It’s everything she could have wanted, before she became a Slayer or after.

Kendra punches her, snaps back her head, and follows it up with a front kick that sends her flying. She knows what she should do, her body is already tensed to flip upright, to hit back, to Slay.

She stays on the ground, her cheek in the dirt – heaven has dirt? – and just breathes.

“Get up.” It’s an order, she can hear it, feel it resonating in her bones. “Get up!” Kendra kicks her, and her ribs should crack, her skin should break, but there’s no damage, there’s barely any pain – heaven has pain? – and she pulls back to do it again, then stops.

“Get up,” she says, and her voice sounds like it might break. “What have you done to Buffy?”

“I am Buffy.” She rolls over and sits up. She’s been so very much Buffy for what feels like such a long time, she doesn’t want to give it up. It fits so well, being Buffy, like her skin was finally big enough to hold her. “I saved her.”

“I don’t understand.”

She looks up at her, on her butt in heaven, where she’s dead, and apparently she can’t be Buffy any longer. But she has no other name these days. She is her other self no longer. Buffy is the one who gets heaven.

She is just a copy, a fake.

She was someone else once, and then she was Buffy, and now she is nothing.

Nothing closes her eyes.


End file.
